Building Your Platform for Book Sales: Three Essential Tips
Yesterday I was talking with one of my authors who is going through Round #3 with his agent with publisher after publisher asking for:
- the number of followers the author has on his various platforms
- the number of people the author has on his mailing lists
- the number of speaking engagements the author had in the past and the number set for this year
What does this tell you about publishers?
They are now, more than ever, focused on the number of people and opportunities you can create to sell your books. This is the time to really think about continuous trust-building opportunities to build a sustainable book author platform.
Following are three tips to start with:
- Don’t go it alone. Get a group of people who really know your work and have benefitted from working with you to become your first circle of support. Then, take the time to interview them. There is a win-win in this strategy. You find out what you did for them that benefitted them while their stories reveal that you were the one who made the difference in their success.
- Create free content. I have free checklists and guides on my Networlding.com site that help people open up a relationship with me and build trust. You too can do the same. Again, this is a win-win opportunity. You share your thought leadership and people benefit from it and get to know you and trust you more.
- Develop strategies for viral sharing. For example, this is Friday that I am writing this blog entry. I am going to make a request on this big “Follow Friend” Day on Twitter to request people to forward this blog article to five friends. See the ripple effect? You to can do this!
Bonus Tip: Don’t give up. Use the above ideas and keep looking for others. Create a Word Doc or Google Doc (I love Google Docs) repository for the ideas. Keep at it. You will get results in no time!